Perspective Interpretation of the news based on evidence, including data, as well as anticipating how events might unfold based on past events

Progressives are thinking seriously about foreign policy

A sneak preview of 2020 foreign policy debates.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks about his new book, “Where We Go From Here: Two Years in the Resistance,” at a George Washington University/Politics and Prose event in Washington on Tuesday. (Alex Brandon/AP)

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

November 28

FiveThirtyEight’s Julia Azari has decided to start writing about the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, and all I can say is damn her, damn her to the depths of Hades. Consider the floodgates for 2020 hot takes to be officially open.

The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts does not want to talk about horse races or anything resembling horse races. What will be interesting is the degree of foreign policy debate on the Democratic side.

This is no small matter. Centrists have dominated the Democratic Party foreign policy discourse since the Clinton administration. I’m a centrist, so I should be happy about this. I’m also a big believer in the marketplace of ideas, however, and the homogeneity of Democratic foreign policy discourse has stunted the debate. As I noted last year, “Democrats are as split on foreign policy as Republicans, but there has not been a foreign policy standard-bearer on the left who takes the issue seriously beyond ‘no more wars.’ If you believe in the ‘Overton Window’ of policy articulation, the failure of the progressive wing to talk about foreign affairs has circumscribed the range of acceptable policy options.”

There are no lack of standard-bearers anymore. Sen. Bernie Sanders hired some serious foreign policy folks and is starting to speak in a much more interesting way about foreign policy than he did in 2016. Beyond Sanders, a whole raft of articles, essays and op-eds about what a progressive foreign policy should look like have been coming out. For a sampling, check out:

There are some stark differences in the progressive visions articulated above. Beinart and Bessner in particular are not only critical of liberal internationalism, they are also pretty skeptical of any exercise of American power too far away from home. This leads them to advocate for a spheres-of-influence approach toward other great powers. There is a lot of overlap between that view and the realpolitik perspectives of Stephen Walt or John Mearsheimer.

It will also be interesting to see how much progressives drill down beyond overarching grand strategy questions. For example, Nicholas Mulder in the Nation recently made some bold statements about how progressives should approach economic sanctions as a tool of foreign policy: “a realistic appraisal must confront the fact that sanctions fail much more often than they succeed, and that their unintended consequences are rarely worth the meager gains. The left in the United States and abroad needs to challenge the sanctions orthodoxy of liberal internationalism, reinventing the power of economic pressure for progressive purposes while reducing its dangerous excesses in world politics.”